


Ours Is Not a Love Song (Your Heart Is Not the Beat)

by biggrstaffbunch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 19:35:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Reunions, you're told, are never easy."</i> Rose comes back to the Doctor, but there are things that they both have to re-learn. Five times the Doctor wondered if it was worth it, and one time he didn't have to question at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ours Is Not a Love Song (Your Heart Is Not the Beat)

 

**i.  
the rose is not afraid to blossom/though it knows its petals must fall**

What puzzles you is the sex, and somewhere, sometime, a woman named Reinette is laughing to the stars.

The language of intimacy is punctuated with a physicality that's always eluded you: a kiss as a comma, a caress as an elipse. You're navigating uncertain seas, but instincts have always served as a good enough compass before. You dive into it like a composer constructing his symphony, building notes on a page, music lovingly crafted.

You learn how to touch Rose beyond tangling your fingers with hers or wrapping your arms around the dip of her waist. You learn how to touch Rose with all the reverence of an artisan moulding his masterpiece, each snap of a button or tug of string revealing another bare centimetre of skin. You uncover her curves, her cells, her taste. You kiss the small of her back, the bones which bracket her spine bumping your fingers as you sweep the smooth expanse of muscles and skin and blank canvas just there for the mapping.

You learn how to touch her like that, but it's not enough, and you're not quite sure why.

Rose moves against you like she's dreamt of it for ages, but when she opens her eyes, they're wet and dark and disconnected. Fathoms deep and faraway, so filtered you can barely see yourself reflected back. What does it mean, you wonder, that you can see futures and pasts and planets and possibilities but you can't catch your own face in Rose's gaze? Time has the tendency to fall apart in ways calenders can't encapsulate. Suns burn and seasons turn and years unfold on the whims of madmen.

Companions come back from alternate universes, harder and sharper and older than before. With distrust in the brush of their lips to your jaw, with disappointment in every sigh against your hair.

Her body is feverish and foreign under yours. You realize with clarity that this is a path you've never traversed before, and for all that you are a quick learner, this isn't anything _like_ cricket. It's been centuries since you bothered to translate complex feelings and emotions into any type of action, and you haven't got a banana daquiri to swirl around when the going gets tough now. You look at the flush deepening along the valley of Rose's hip, and you want to press your cheek to the soft flesh, the pillowed rise.

She cards her fingers through your hair, and it's almost forgiveness for all the things your gestures don't (could never) say.

 

**ii. she broke your throne, she cut your hair**

You are not a human, but you have human flaws. You get too angry, you get too sad. You spend far too long worrying over the state of your dress. And you fall in love. Wondrous, reckless, terrible love, the kind that proper lords (Time or otherwise) would never deign to recognize, let alone obey. But one day after the Time War, you made the-- _mistake? even now, you can't quite bring yourself to call it that, exactly_ \--of looking at Rose while she was laughing at the sky, and something in your throat closed. Your wings folded back and your sword fell to your side and for one long moment, you had no one left to save, no one left to avenge. Just a girl and her wonder at the universe you'd come to hate. She wore stars in her hair that night and you think that's when you realized your armor was wearing dangerously thin and you didn't even _care_ , not really.

And now you're faced with the possibility of crumbling where you stand, a statue toppling off its pedestal in a last bid to be among the people. You are no lonely angel, no Oncoming Storm. You are not a god nor a monster nor a man. You're the Doctor, you have had ten faces but two hearts, and you're just a fraction of the teensiest bit insane. You're in love with a girl.

You know who _you_ are (more or less) after nearly a millenia. Which is good. Which is _brilliant_ , in fact.

You're still working on the girl, though.

 

**iii.  
when i shook her hand i really shook a glove**

If you're the designated driver, Rose is the passenger who never quite left but is no longer quite there.

Her scent haunts the halls of the TARDIS and her clothing litters the railings. But when she wanders the console room now, her fingers stumble over dials she once turned with ease. You want to bring her through the veil, make her more than a ghost and less than a memory. You want her to be a part of the parts of her that accumulate around your ship.

Reunions, you are told, are never easy.

 

**iv.  
all the lights came on at sunset/thought you'd stay**

It's been five months since she fine-tuned a frequency and fell through a rift, flickering in and out of your TARDIS like so many dreams. The dark slash of her brows told you that it was an accident, but the abandon in her voice told you that she didn't care. She hugged you and it was the summation of all things Rose Tyler--warm skin, helpless laughter, blazing sunshine and a hint of bubblegum. You spun her counterclockwise to the revolutions of the earth, and the skirt of her dress twirled up around her thighs. Your skin burned where it touched hers.

Five months in, though, and she's less than whole. You finally remember that if reunions are only ever as good as the goodbye, you broke Rose with your gentle reason on the churning shores of Bad Wolf Bay. It makes sense that she would break more decisively now, that parts of her would crack and drop away one by one like cooling, splintering glass. It makes sense that her knees would be less than strong, her limbs trembling like her breath against your ears. It makes sense that you would piece her back together again, only you forget how. Human hearts are so delicate, after all, and your fingers have gotten clumsy with age. You say her name because there is power in a name, but you don't think you're fixing much at all.

"Rose," and her eyes bleed gold when she cries in her sleep. "Rose," and the syllable sits on your tongue like a stray lash on her cheek.

You can rewrite entire chronologies with nary the flick of a button, but you don't know how to keep Rose from sleeping with her shoes on. You don't know how to make her sing again. Clocks unwind and Rose whispers of corners in space that you've never seen, stars that have yet to be born. You twist the levers and fly into the dark and hope it's enough, for once.

Woman Wept is as beautiful and still as a memory. Blue-shadowed glow and cold air, and your words curl into smoke as soon as they pass your lips. This is perhaps a good thing; you've not a very good track record with words, in this body.

There is silence for long moments, just the phantom rush of water crashing into waves. You pass your fingers over a row of icicles dangling off the edge of a half-formed crest. They break in a sequence of well-timed falls, the sound of them shattering a bit like a million crystal butterflies beating their wings. Rose breathes in, wipes the rime from an icy panel.

"When I look at the sky," she begins, letting her hand rest on the frozen slope, "all I can see are zepplins." She lifts her wrist and the watery imprint of her palm fades. Remnants of another universe circle slowly behind her luminous eyes. "Doctor, have you ever missed the stars?"

You take her hand, impossibly small and slim and cold. Her skin is papery and transculent; you could map entire timelines in the threads of her veins. "Tell me," you say. "What do you want?" You picture a doll, pale and perfect and delicate. You picture mending the rips, the empty, gaping holes where its heart should be, where its mouth is wide and open in a silent shout. Rose's mouth is small and swollen, lips slick with words unsaid. The slide of her tongue behind her teeth makes you think of kissing her.

Her smile is brief like the crescent moon, white and wavering in the black of the night. "I want to believe in happy endings," she answers. The gravity in her voice hits you somewhere low in your gut, and suddenly, she won't look at you. Something green shimmers over the fall of her hair. You trace the column of her neck as she closes her eyes. "I want to believe I can keep you."

All the fairytales in the world couldn't guarantee that, but you lean close anyway. "Once upon a time," you promise, and you lead her back into your magic blue box, listening to the whisper of her shoes on the snow.

A twist of a lever and then you're flying into the dark and it _must_ be enough, it must.

 

**v.  
no more whiskey slurs, no more blonde haired girls/for your whole eternal life**

"You have this disconcerting habit of getting firmly attached to sweet young women with golden hair."

Jack speaks idly, but his cheek is twitching. He's read your files, knows all the adventures you've had, knows all the people you've met. Did a stint in 1913 himself, and you _know_ you've seen him at Sparrow and Nightingale once or twice. He knows things about you, but it doesn't give him the right to make generalizations.

Lynda with a 'Y', Madame du Pompadour, Sally Sparrow, Astrid Peth. Women who looked to you with dreams in their teeth, the gleam of their smiles speaking of futures among the stars. You wanted to give them what you gave Rose. The opportunity to fly, to _become_. But you're not the deliverer of fates, and it wasn't meant to be, not for any of them.

Not for any of them except Rose, and even then--well, you wonder.

Rose is walking the Hub and the TARDIS is recharging. Jack looks at you with something like betrayal in his eyes, but you know that given the chance, he would waltz with her in a heartbeat, teetering along the edges of Big Ben. She saved him out of love, once very long ago. She damned him out of love, once very long ago. You and Jack are probably quite a bit alike, actually.

"She's different, Doc," Jack says, and his voice is softer. There is something achingly lost in the blue of his eyes, and you allow yourself a moment of regret for all you've done to put him where he is. "You got her back, but she's...wrong."

How do you tell him that it's not Rose that's wrong, but this reality? That the colors here are brighter, sharper, too vivid. That the absence of dirigibles in the sky makes her eyes blur, that the Vitex signs in another London tied Rose down to a past that isn't hers, in this world. How do you tell him that Rose wants to go back home, even though she _is_ home? How do you tell him what she's given up to be with you (everything) and what you've given her in return (not nearly enough)? How do you tell him that she's afraid of the sacrifice being too much, of you getting tired of her, of her getting tired of this? How do you tell Jack all that?

You don't. Of course.

You just keep quiet and you keep an eye on Rose, and you wonder what kind of future she has in store for her, this sweet young woman with the golden hair.

And all you can do is hope that future is with you, whatever and wherever it is.

 

**vi.  
i carved your name across my eyelids**

Time Lords aren't meant to consort with humans. Except when they do, of course. Except when _you_ do.

Rebellion has led you on many great and terrible paths, but none more so than the winding road you've travelled with Rose Tyler. Nine hundred plus and you ran along the edges of the galaxy with a girl barely two decades old. Kissed the vortex out of her and the instant you were reborn, you looked into her bright, shining face and knew you were in trouble. You've dealt death for her and been dealt death by her, and somewhere above the nimbus of her wild hair, the spectre of her own death still hangs.

And that's what you do, isn't it? Kill the ones you love, just by breathing long past breath has left them. Things you touch turn to dust, and no amount of changing faces can change inevitability. In this body or the next, you will bring destruction in your wake. Love is damnation in so many ways, and you sleep with your arms out, an invisible cross to bear weighing heavy on your thin shoulders.

"Doctor?" Rose's fingers curl around your doorjamb, and her fringe is rumpled across her forehead. She looks unbearably young in her long shirt and bare legs. You want to move your hand under the cotton, feel the jump in her belly, curve your fingertips against the heavy weight of her breasts.

"Rose," you say, and you've never heard that tone before, the warmth of it almost involuntary. "Come to bed."

She walks into your room and crawls over your sheets, and the steady-thump- _thump_ of her heart is enough to put you at ease. You never got the chance to hold her like this before the yawning maw of the void almost swallowed her whole. You never got the chance to miss what you never had. But now, at this very moment, you can almost forget Daleks and 1913 and that year aboard the _Valiant._ Because love is absolution as well, and when you wake, you keep the blazing heat of innocence and hope tucked deep into the corners of your twin hearts. And you're fine with carrying it for the both of you for just awhile, as Rose gets her bearings, as she readjusts to this world and this life and _you_. She might have gone, and she may still go again, but she's here right now, and right now is what counts.

Sand sifts through the hourglass, but your hand is on the pulse of time, and the reedy tempo tells you there is still so much more to come.

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from LiveJournal.


End file.
